CAREER: Quantifying Erosional Processes on Upland Landscapes

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Proposal Title: PECASE: Quantifying Erosional Processes on Upland LandscapesInstitution: Dartmouth CollegePI proposes a five-year research project to quantify specific constitutive relationships for sediment production and transport processes, integrating methodologies and building the synergy between learning and discovery into an education plan. Research will test hypotheses to (1) quantify erodability, or mechanical strength, of parent material across landscapes with known soil production functions, (2) quantify soil production rates and processes across portions of the landscape not examined previously, and (3) quantify the mechanisms of sediment transport across the same landscapes to better define widely applicable erosion laws. Specifically, PI will use lab and field testing to determine the mechanical state of the parent material, in situ produced cosmogenic nuclides (10Be and 26Al) to determine soil production and catchment-averaged erosion rates, and short-lived fallout nuclides (7Be, 210Pb, 137Cs, and 241Am) coupled with a numerical model to quantify sediment transport processes on the same sites. These independent methodologies will be used to test three fundamental hypotheses underlying our understanding of actively eroding soil-mantled landscapes. These hypotheses are all field-testable, link the processes shaping a landscape and may help explain the variability among soil-mantled landscapes, yet they have not been quantitatively tested to date. Additionally, work at each field site will address specific questions regarding the transport laws best describing the dominant geomorphic processes operating on the sites as well as the weathering history of the sites."This project was originally funded as a CAREER award, and was converted to a Presidential Early Career Award for Engineers and Scientists (PECASE) award in September 2004.